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Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Wait, it’s Tuesday? How did that happen?

Welcome back to Life After Contract where I talk about
how things get suddenly different but also exactly the same.

After signing, one of the things that almost immediately
happens is your time just drains away. Gone. Like, “Yesterday I had 24 hours in
a day, and magically, mystically, today I only have 10. And I’m working my day
job for 8 of them!”

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but almost the
instant you get a contract, there’s now a million different things you have to
do: edit the book, build a platform (if you don’t have one), edit your book, clean
up your online profile (or delete a few as you never know how good your fans
will be at digging), edit your book, and of course building marketing.

And all of that stuff is really boring. You shouldn’t talk
about editing so much, at least not in any way that is actually interesting.
The nitty gritty of editing is really boring and, in some cases, confidential.
So no talky.

Building or dismantling profiles, well, no one wants to talk
about deleting all those very personal posts on the very public blog. So nothing
to talk about there.

Other boring writerly things that are suddenly important:
Writing a bio, getting author pics, coming up with a plan for marketing, and
unless you have a bunch of money to spend on advertising, now is the time to
start selling your services to help launch your book, or to start pitching to
all those reader blogs. This stuff swallows time in unreasonably large doses,
eating away at all the other time, like the deadline bound editing, and the
holy grail: writing the next book.

In the light of all those new responsibilities, many of
which are grade A not interesting, it’s no wonder writers suddenly stop
blogging so much. It is however part of the whole experience. And you can
literally spend hours and hours on those tasks with nothing to show, nothing to
point to. So yeah, right after the contract is a very exciting time filled with
new tasks—some of which a writer may or may not be good at—and the book news is
all exactly the same. So there’s not a lot to say.

Blog posts from this time go like this, “I did more writer
stuff today. It was boring and confidential, so nope, I can’t talk about it.
Some of it has me happy. Some of it has me sad. I’ve been told that I will sell
more when I am happy, so don’t pay any attention to the part that isn’t happy.
Besides, it’s not even real unhappiness, it’s disappointment that my contract
didn’t come with all the great trappings of fame and fortune like those movies
showed me—specifically, I’m not JK Rowling yet. PR refuses to work on that for
me.”

For those of you reading who’ve been through the weird post
contract-suddenly-my-title-changed-to-published-author-and-it-isn’t-like-the-movies,
what parts were the hardest for you?